Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonbanker | Hacker News Reader

Regarding your demo: When Firefox is an unsupported browser, and it isn't the year 2000 anymore, I stop using your website.

Looked like a fun game, but unless it has a (not half-assed) SteamOS port, you probably won't get my money.

View on HN

I don't understand the downvote, if the demo doesn't work on half the browsers[0] in the world at the moment then it's not great is it? More so when most of them can actually have decent WebGL performance.

[0]: http://gs.statcounter.com/

Better support for the demo would be good, sure. But "I stop using your website" because one feature of it is browser-specific is rather extreme. And the snipe about SteamOS support, when as far as I can see there's no mention of target platforms at all, just comes off as rude.

There was a lot of density in my comment. I'll unravel.

The point is I'm a linux-only gamer using firefox. I am clearly not their target market. I felt it appropriate to explain that I was not about to download chrome(ium) on my device in order to view their game. Browser monocultures are a dangerous meme I do not wish to support.

If there was a chance it would be ported to SteamOS, I would buy it in a heartbeat, even if I didn't get to play the demo (the Youtube video was nice). It's safe to guess (I'd love to be wrong) that, if they're focusing on only one browser, they're likely going to focus on only one platform. If I'm wrong, and this ends up being released via emscripten/asm.js, (or, even better, a native SteamOS port) I'll happily eat my words.

SteamOS has some lousy linux ports so far, unless you get Ryan Gordon to port it, or use Unity/Unreal. My "Half-assed" parenthetical was in reference to this. There's a real Blue Ocean opportunity here for good coders fluent in DirectX and OpenGL/SDL to make decent careers off porting to SteamOS right now.

I work on the game. Really happy to hear you like what we have done, and sorry to disappoint. We have moved from WebGL to Unity and are currently porting our demo.

Send us an email at hello@corsair-game.net if you want to help test our Linux releases!

(lengthy) email sent. The fact that you ported from WebGL to Unity proves that I was largely barking up the wrong tree.

Shouldn't WebGL work in Firefox though?

I'd say if the demo doesn't work in Firefox, it's definitely not great. Do we really want to go back to '90s with "best viewed in IE" or "best viewed in Netscape" type of signs?

Did we ever really leave that behind? Seems half the Show HNs are "best in Chrome" things.

> When Firefox is an unsupported browser, and it isn't the year 2000 anymore, I stop using your website.

But all the hip kids in San Francisco are using Chrome on MacBooks! And as far as they're concerned, the world consists of … kids in San Francisco using Chrome on MacBooks.

This is at best an pre-Alpha version. Multi browser support can generally be added fairly late in the process.

Adding multi-browser support late in the process is like adding error handling into your application code late in the process.

I was able to view in Edge just by changing the user-agent in browser dev tools. Might work in Firefox, too.

Agree, browser user agent sniffing is horrible.

What was your issue? I had no problem looking at the site in firefox

https://alpha.corsair-game.net/demo redirects to https://corsair-game.net/unsupported-browser/

Unsupported browser

The browser you are currently using is unfortunately not supported.

As of now Corsair can only be played with Chrome. In the future we hope to add support for more browsers.

Ah, I missed the demo part. that is pretty shitty of them. I don't mind if sites say "warning: we havent really optimised for your browser, but try anyway", but flat out blocking the content is indeed terrible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com